CISSP study course

If security has any interest and you live in the United States, the CISSP course is a worthy Human Resource stamp on broad IT understanding & Security. Unfortunately, Europe doesn’t have an equivalent course focusing more on European legislation such as the GDPR as opposed to major focus on American legislation and regulations, such as HIPAA, COPPA, Privacy and Fraud related material.

I took a course 12 years ago, but was too inexperienced to pass the exam back then. I decided that now, more experienced in the security domains and wiser ;), was the time to push through and get the certification, so I bought a few books, and studied hard, taking a week off work cramming, provisionally passing the exam, giving them 6 weeks to check up on my endorsements, etc.

I purchased the following books:

  • (ISC)2 CISSP Certified Information Systems Security Professional Official Study Guide, 8e & CISSP Official (ISC)2 Practice Tests, 2e
  • Official (ISC)2 Guide to the CISSP CBK, Fourth Edition
  • CISSP For Dummies

The CBK, I bought to use as a reference manual after advice from a colleague.

The dummies book lacked a few things, so after a few chapters and some answers to questions in a prep test, not present in the book (regarding security models), I decided to solely focus on the official study guide. I did look up stuff I didn’t understand properly in the Official Study Guide, to see if it was explained better in the Dummies.

Happy studying, if you think it’s worth a shot. No matter what, it’s a great way to catch up on stuff you don’t work on on a daily basis.

And when completing the exam, a great way to get CPE credits for your program is to connect ISC2’s brighttalk channel to your CISSP ID , and all the ISC2 webinars you watch, will automatically be registered.  See support article here